Recently I needed to boot a Dell server (PE1950) from a USB flash drive. The flash drive contained a bootable image from the CentOS 5 DVD (images/diskboot.img), to run the CentOS installer, and kickstart the machine over the network. When cold booting these machines (eg. from a power down state), there is no problem at all. I simply hit F11 to enter the boot menu, choose the Front USB flash drive that shows up in the menu, and the machine starts booting - no problem here.

When I moved from syslog to syslog-ng on my laptop running Fedora 7, I noticed a lot of these warnings in /var/log/messages:

Jul 10 09:29:34 speedy syslog-ng[2272]: Number of allowed concurrent connections exceeded; num='10', max='10'

On Linux, there is a global and per-user limit of open file descriptors (read: maximum number of open files). The global limit is distribution and kernel specific, the per-user limit is set to 1024 by default. However, some applications, like Lotus Domino, Oracle, ... require to have more than 1024 open files.

Hi all, and welcome to my blog. As you can see, this is my first blog entry.